About Life as an Art Form
An international learning community of individuals who embrace personal growth as the means to create greater meaning, fulfillment, and happiness in their lives.
The basic premise of LAAF is that life success comes about as a result of two separate but complementary, yin/yang strategies:
- Adopting certain habits and practices that yield satisfaction, contentment, and peace of mind – also known as subjective well-being, or happiness.
- Meeting life’s adversities head-on, guided by certain processes to move through them consciously – and develop life wisdom as a result.
There is no cost to becoming a member of this awesome community. You can do so simply by completing the signup form at the bottom of any page on this website. That will subscribe you to our newsletter, a wonderful source of weekly information to guide you to the means to truly flourish in life.
LAAF gives you the skills to:
- Enhance your relationship skills with friends and family.
- Increase your intimacy and empathy with your partner.
- Further develop your interpersonal skills – the primary factor for career success and meaningful relationships.
- Discover and heal inner messages that sabotage your best intentions.
- Build your leadership abilities.
As of mid-2021, the community offerings are evolving. Here’s what we currently do:
- A weekly newsletter with specifics on one concept for greater happiness, or means of transcending suffering.
- Virtual groups where people support one another in adopting new habits that yield greater appreciation of life exactly as it exists today.
- Personal mentoring for members facing life challenges for which they seek support and encouragement.
- Accountability dyads with other community members for support in adopting new life-enhancing practices, or releasing unhealthy habits.
There are other initiatives planned for later in 2021 and beyond.
If you’d like to learn to better understand and acknowledge your own personal power, while expanding your appreciation of life, then you’re in the right place.
About me
My name is Bobby Wuest. I’m a re-fired American expat living my best life imaginable
in a tropical paradise.
I’m a writer. But writing was never my aspiration. It came about as more of an intuitive process.
Before I started writing on Quora in 2017 I’d had a couple articles published in magazines. I wrote on occasion, but I didn’t consider myself a writer. That changed when I started writing Quora answers several times a week. I naturally found myself responding to two categories of questions: Happiness, and the Law of Attraction.
I felt I had experience to share to benefit others on both topics – because my remarkably happy and satisfactory lifestyle was all the proof I needed to consider myself as having accumulated quite a bit of life wisdom about happiness. Plus, I attributed a good deal of my life success to using Law of Attraction techniques for over 10 years.
In 2018 I wrote Upgrade Your Lifestyle: 10 Keys to Unlock a Steady State of Happiness partially as a way of further understanding and integrating the many habits, practices, and processes I’d adopted over 20 years of self-development work that led to a remarkably satisfying life. And, of course, to share those concepts with others.
I got the inspiration then – in 2018 – to start an online community devoted to opening to greater happiness. I ignored that urge for 3-4 years. Only in early 2021 did I decide to act on it.
As a consequence of starting this initiative, I’ve had to become rigorous about studying the behavioral science and neurological origins of happiness, and the best modern psychological guidance on the subject, and ancient philosophies like Buddhism, Stoicism, and Taoism – that are time-tested sources of guidance.
Earlier in life
Over a 30-year career in the IT field, I achieved many benchmarks of worldly success. But my career success never yielded life success – self-esteem, satisfaction, contentment, and peace of mind.
I had a crash-and-burn, lifequake experience, in which everything that made up my self-identity suddenly dissolved over a period of just a few months. I went into a deep depression.
From those low moments in my life when it felt like all reasons to go on living had been lost, I was fortunate to be guided to a new way of being. One based more on serving others than getting more for me – which had previously been my way throughout my entire adult life.
I’ll spare you all the details of this life-enhancing journey that continues even today, 20 years later. But the single most profound aspect of it was learning to acknowledge and appreciate my emotions, and process them in ways that led to greater freedom and choice.
I invested over 2,000 hours in support groups devoted to revealing and transcending the self-defeating messages resulting from childhood abuse. As I benefitted from this support, the desire arose within me to learn to facilitate the psychological processes to help others in the same way I’d been helped. These are among the mentoring skills I use as I engage weekly with LAAF members.
If you haven’t clicked away from my brief bio, thanks for reading. I hope to have the opportunity to get to know you.
